Letters to an Unnamed Prisoner
by freudian fuckup
Summary: A series of 6 letters written by Remus during Sirius's time in Azkaban, followed by some... other material...
1. 22 November 1981

22 November 1981

There is no mail in Azkaban. I know this; do not think me naïve. I cling tightly to the belief that you will never see this (so why do I keep excusing myself? I don't know, don't ask me). Nevertheless, I feel compelled to write to you. About you. For you.

It terrifies me how much I miss you.

Fuck.

This is wrong.

-- Remus


	2. 30 December 1982

30 December 1982

I heard about Harry today. He's with horrible people who will, no doubt, attempt to make of him a horrible person in their image, but none the less, he smiles and laughs and puts things in his mouth that probably should not be in anyone's mouth. He's James' son, through and through.

They are saying he will be more powerful than He Who Must Not Be Named. I think I am starting to believe them.

I only hope one day he meets you. Because I'll never have the nerve to kill you myself.

-- R


	3. 3 March 1984

3 March 1984

Do you remember when we first began school, and my parents warned me to stay away from you, because you were A Black and that meant Trouble? I'm so glad they aren't alive to see me now—a wretch who didn't amount to anything because he was too busy sleeping with the enemy. Could I have stopped you? Or was the very existence of Us a symptom of your madness? Would you have loved me if you hadn't been corrupt?

Nevermind. You didn't love me. I resend the question. You needed a fuck and I was a fool. Love is for children, and we are hardened men, are we not?

We are. In so many ways.

-- Remus


	4. 1 July 1984

1 July 1984

This is the end. I have to stop writing these damning, psychotic letters to a prisoner who will never read them, much less give a damn what they contain.

Were you proud? When you betrayed them, did your face light up, like it did when we won the House Cup our seventh year, or when we fucked for the first time?

Or were you anxious? Like when you realized Filch was on to you for selling dungbombs to the First Years, or when we fucked for the last time?

Do you remember that last time? I know they say the Dementors can drain a man of his memories, but I hope that is one you keep. Together, we were alive, just for a little while. Our skin was static energy, crackling and stinging with every touch. Your lips on my shoulder blade—they destroy me, even as I write this. So practiced, so routine, the whole affair, except for the months of lingering silence that still hung over our heads. I wonder how many words were said in that frantic, tragic hour. Twenty? Ten? A million too few.

And one too many: goodbye.

You must have already done it by then, you must have. James was dead hours later—you must have already betrayed them. When you came, shaking against my skin, nails clinging to my hipbones, teeth piercing my shoulder, my back, my body—when you came, did you have to fight to hold back all the dark things you never told me? Did they rise like bile in your throat and choke the moans that spilled obscenely into my hair?

Enough.

-- Remus


	5. 31 October 1986

31 October 1986

Someone asked today how I was "coping." For a moment I could not remember if it was James' and Lily's deaths or yours about which they were inquiring. But then I remembered: you are not dead. And you are not to be mourned.

James, James Potter, man's man and family man, martyr, savior, selfless to the last— is to be mourned.

Lily Evans (for she is always Evans, always 16 and sweet and Evans in my mind), beautiful girl, beautiful mother, beautiful tragedy— is to be mourned.

Black, Sirius Black, Black in name and deed and lineage, traitor, murderer, liar, deceiver, flatterer, lover— is to be forgotten. Forgotten and buried, though his body still endures (every heartbeat an insult to those who's hearts are silent in your wake). He is to be cursed and defiled, abandoned and unloved. It is the right of the victims. I may as well be the murderer, for all the forgetting I have yet to get around to doing.

-- RJL


	6. 8 January 1990

8 January 1990

I thought I was finished with this.

Last night, you were in my bed (a bed you have never even seen, but nonetheless). You were wound tight around me, just as we once slept in my tiny dormitory bed. Your body was long and hard against mine, and your breathing was soft and calm. I could smell you—the canine scent you had long before you became Padfoot, the expensive shampoo you didn't use that last year, the earthy smell of dirt and cigarettes. I could feel your damned fingers— twisted in my hair, digging into my back.

You murmured something to me, and I could not understand you. I begged you to repeat it, whispered pleas and softly spoken rationality, but you were gone, and I was suddenly much more awake than I have been these last nine years.

You deserve everything you have gotten, but sometimes, in my most bitter, childish moments, I think that it's not fair to me. What did I do to deserve to lose the only person I ever truly—

I am selfish to the last.

Was I always this way?

(_Unsigned_)


	7. Thoughts From a Hide Out 10 September 93

Thoughts from a hide out.

10 September 1993

I knew you when we were young and the world was strange and foreign, like some vivid dream etched in our minds during the blue-grey hours of dawn. I didn't know who we were then, and neither did you. You fumbled with words and gestures too large and mature for your age. For your face— it was sad then too, I recall. Like a toy, loved to shreds and mended, but still wincing at the damage. Fewer scars, but I think you had more wrinkles than you do now. Is that possible? Can one age out of one's maturity? I wouldn't know.

I knew you when you were learning to be the things you are now. When days were long and sunsets stretched forever, screaming our names with hollow promises, and orange to red to purple voices. Magic curled around your fingertips, wound through your muscles. I envied magic. I envied the things that were allowed to dwell inside you, in your skin and soul: magic, blood, oxygen, and sin. I was jealous of the air that kept you alive. I was only a child, and such things still seemed rational, reasonable as life itself. Love seemed solid. It was ever-present and achingly sharp. It twanged in the air on winter nights, right along with the cold. This was, of course, before love became the enemy. The pulsing, shimmering mirage out in the surf that drew us away from the shore again and again, then smashed us against the rocks in bitter, brittle pieces. But it was solid _then_, once upon a life.

I knew you when you were barely there, a rasping whisper of yourself. Your voice never stood up well against the noise of spellfire, the rattles of death. Your words were drowned out, but I could always (and please believe me, _always_) hear them. I couldn't help but hear them. Tiny shards of sanity, scrapping their way into my raw, bloody mind. Your words. Words of madness and "forevers". The words of boys playing at soldier and fighting only for the chance to become the adults they already are. Criminal things, you might have said to me (I think you did, but I sometimes think I thought wrong). And there were touches too, faint as fog and twice as fleeting. Glances over Order dinners, fingers lingering moments too long. Did they notice? Do you think they knew? I was star-eyed and dog-eared and didn't give a damn, but sometimes I wonder. And wonder if it even matters (it doesn't. I mention it only in passing).

I knew you in dark places, where cracks beneath doors shone like spotlights, so we performed. Cold white skin stretched against peeled-paint walls. Cold lips and hot, desperate mouths. You and your school boy hair, wizened grin, sharpened hipbones cutting me open. Dingy, forgotten places, meant for forgotten men like us. That's a lie, and I don't know why I said it. We are not forgotten. We burn to be, but we are always interrupted. We are those that children flee from. To be forgotten is a luxury, a state of freedom we have never, will never know. Men crave legend. Men yearn for their names and deeds to ring out in stately places after they have melted into earth. You long for silence. The silence of any tongue that might invoke your name, so that the syllables die in the mouth and come out only in breath and frustration.

I know you now, though we don't know one another, I know who you were becoming, and I know the things that went so wrong. You are muddling and bumbling your way in no direction in particular, with your compass cast adrift and your oars limp at your sides. No steady course, no sure and certain port. There are men meant for finalities, but you are not one of them. We were our own destiny, but God is dead and so is James, and so I sit, and you sit, and we all fall, apart.

It's still in you though—the wretched, wondrous madness that draws you to me. It slinks through your veins, silent and observant. Alone and burning, a hot, slow flame, deep beneath your skin. And the others don't know (but _we_ know).


	8. Letter to a Fugitive 12 October 1993

12 October 1993

I always knew you'd manage it. Well, perhaps it is more accurate to say that I knew if _anyone_ managed it, it would be you. Bravo, comrade. All those years of mischief were just practice for your grand escape.

I won't waste my time wondering how you did it; I know your mind is far too perverse, subversive to fathom. I imagine it must have been something ghastly. How many did you kill on your way out? The Prophet didn't mention any deaths, but I suspect more and more these days that the Prophet is the Ministry, and that the Ministry is rife with paranoia and repression. Or perhaps I am the paranoid one.

At any rate, I write to you not with questions, but with a warning:

Padfoot, do not go near him. Besides the obvious threats of Dementors everywhere and Dumbledore coming down upon you like the almighty hand of God, let me add another incentive for you to stay as far from him as is possible on this earth.

Let me add my own threat.

I will lay down my life in an instant to protect Prongs' son. Do not doubt this. Whatever we may have had, once upon a wartime, is dead, and that child is more a man than either of us has ever managed to be. He will outlive us both, I will see to it.

Do not make me kill you, Padfoot. If I did, it would destroy me, and if I were unable, I may as well kill myself.

(Please.)

--Moony


	9. Letter to a Fugitive 1 November 1993

1 November 1993

I know how you did it. Clever, Padfoot, clever. I'm surprised it took me this long to work it out. I should have known you would use one sin to commit another.

But you've made a tactical error; in fact, you made it twelve years ago—you left someone alive that knows your secret.

It's fitting, really, that the most beautiful, selfless thing you or anyone ever did for me would lead to so much terror. In a roundabout way, your escape is _my_ fault.

I should put down this quill, stop writing letters to ghosts, and walk into Dumbledore's office right now. I might confess to him our decades old indiscretions. Some would even say that I, in the interest of full disclosure, might have mentioned long ago that, in addition to being school mates with the infamous Sirius Black, I also happened to have fucked him for several years, blissfully unaware of his betrayals. I might tell Dumbledore all of these things, if not for the sake of my own salvation, then for Harry's.

I might.

But I have yet to.

--Professor RJ Lupin


	10. Somewhere, in the dark 7 November 1993

Somewhere, in the dark, 7 November 1993

He remembers all the things he can't remember. In subtle, useless, maddening ways his body can feel all the people and places and emotions he can no longer feel with his mind. Each of them is a part of him; each claims a little piece of his body.

He remembers James like a hole; a pit of wanting dug out behind his ribs, dark and cold and ohsoveryunfair. James is the laughter that dies in his lungs because there is no one that can ever laugh like they did. Brash, insane, wicked shouts of hysterical, painful laughter, while the others looked on in bemused horror. Images of scandalized professors and turquoise sheep and a rather angry cinnamon biscuit – but nothing cohesive. A story without a plot. He is all nouns, but no verbs. James is an emptiness. James is a longing for innocence and all the things they god damn deserved. But, mostly, he is a blank.

He remembers Lily like a headache. She is a wheedling, gnawing ache behind the eyes: part frustration, part affection, part admiration. Lily is the irritating itch beneath his skull that reminds him to grow up and be careful and never, ever surrender. The shining sixteen-year-old (that he _hated_ once upon a life) and the soft, warm _mother_-above-all-else blend together in a dull heat, just there, where it can't be gotten to, can't be touched. Lily is adjectives describing nothing. And then she is also nothing. 

He remembers Remus on his skin; warmth like sunshine, fingertip touches and a tingling crackle that makes his flesh feel new and sweet. Skin doing everything skin can do: tickling, prickling, stretching, tearing, mending, scarring, touching. Little touches (fingers on the insides of his wrists, knee caps pressed together beneath tables, eyelashes fluttering on a sharp, aristocratic cheek bone) that seared his brain with electric-blue nerve fire. Hard touches (dull pain, searing and aching until _oh gods_ and _please, more, oh-- oh gods_) that turned the world of a teenage boy on its side like a child's plaything. Remus is the shiver that inches up his spine, the gooseflesh that spreads across his arms and legs. Remus is punctuation on a blank page. He is pauses between breaths and full-stops of thought and dot-dot-dots leading to... Without James and Lily, his mind feels full of holes; hollows, like the shadows between his ribs and beneath his eyes. Without Remus, he feels like he doesn't exist.

But slowly, day by day now, they crawl back to him. His mind reassembles itself, oh miraculous wonder, and the feelings of all these feelings he's lost, they squirm beneath the skin, infect his brain. Sensation becomes emotion, newly awakened, until one night, everything is as it once was. One night, in a cave darker than any cell, the pieces click into place, and a madman's laugh cracks the cold-glass air. And then a sob. And then a silence.


End file.
